Wish list

Here you can post your feature requests. There is no guarantee that any of them will actually be implemented. Please keep the Xfce philosophy in mind and add a small explanation why this feature would be useful or a description of the problem it solves.

There is a separate page for panel plugin wishes. This page also includes the internal panel plugins.

Wishes that are struck through are implemented or rejected by the developer.

This list is meant to act as a working list for future additions, not to reopen discussion on features and things that are history.

Project wide

Implement support for high-density (DPI) displays through e.g. a meta-theme that sets large fonts, panel size, icons. All of these are already doable separately, but it would be nice to be able to change all these related settings in one place.

Xfce-icon-theme should respect freedesktops icon naming specification(http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-naming-spec/latest/), e.g. gnome-dev-removable-usb.svg should renamed to drive-removable-media-usb.svg, same thing for actions why there 5 symlinks to one icon? this sucks for icon-themers, why have we icons that begins with gnome? its xfce not gnome, we dont need gnome-mime-application….

It seems that the icon management respects the XDG Base Directory Specification, while the theme management does not. see:

Full keyboard control (ability to work without mouse) - e.g. being able to open desktop menu, navigate through it, focus applications in system tray, bring up the logout/shutdown dialog, show/hide/navigate Xfce panel etc. Just try to pull out your mouse (simulating USB breakdown) and watch how helpless user gets in Xfce. Xfce is great, but depending only on mouse (or keyboard only) is not good.

Maybe add support for moving the cursor with the numpad keys.
This is already handled by X.org, try ctrl-shift-numlock : you can move the cursor with the numpad, and click with 5.

About the Keyboard Control in xfmenu: It'd be great to jump to a menu on key press (key press “o” jumps to Office, “n” to Network and so on) - this would make it more fast to navigate with keyboard only (and no arrow keys). I guess many people know this from Windows Taskbar navigation.

UNIX philosophy. Make simple applications that do one thing well, and don't get in the way of the user – in the GUI. Do NOT take the kitchen sink approach. In this spirit, make an image viewer that is intuitive: PgUp/PgDn scroll up and down in the current directory, can print graphics nicely, and integrates with Thunar so that you can print a series of images with right-click, with advanced options. Similar to Microsoft's Picture and Fax Viewer – a very good application.

This is literally addressed by ristretto, talking about an image viewer. This wish is kind of out-of-scope, though, since Xfce does not (and I hope will not) feature its own applications for everything you could possibly need.

Mouse+keyboard shorcuts. Actually, user can move, raise, lower, etc. windows using some hard coded combination of mouse buttons and keyboard keys, e.g. Alt+button 1 to move window. Related to the “don't get in the way of the user” philosophy commented in the previous point, I think it is better that user can define these shortcuts. I think it is not good to impose to the user certain keyboard+mouse button combinations, mainly when some user can have some accessibility issues (e.g. physical or visual disabilities). This is possible already… Settings Manager > Window Manager Settings > Keyboard > Add a new theme and adjust what you like

reducing the settings to keyboard only is a no-go too. You may spare out the mouse in the default settings but the mouse should be usable as well. This said, the shortcut settings should be global and not under keyboard.

Please be more specific. What parts of Xfce's GUIs could be improved usability-wise? –kelnos

In fact Xfce's core, meanings configuration, plugins and Thunar provide a very good user experience.

Meta-theme handling: A method by which people can distribute “meta-themes” that will set the following module themes: Xfwm theme, background settings, user interface settings (font, GTK theme, icon theme) , splash screen. Maybe also panel layout.

I'm not sure if it's reasonable to share the various kinds of user preferences. This could quickly make packages hard to create, modify or even use.

Group multiple packages to reduce the number of distributed tarballs.
Please don't! Downloading a huge archive only for one tiny program would be the same nonsense KDE practices – Kane

Group goodies

Group libraries (xfce4-libs)

Meta packages are fine, even separate fat tarballs, but only optional.

More consistent and simple naming scheme for Xfce applications. Mostly for new applications or libraries, so we never make mistakes like libxfcegui4 (but libxfce4gui instead).

Make use of Xinerama more convenient: keyboard shortcuts and window buttons/menus to transfer windows to different screens. Also add the ability to maximize across both screens and allow fullscreen across both screens.

I agree on the documentation. I wrote a few words explaining what works for me scim. Any expansion would be helpful of course.

An optional Daemon that uses “sambatree” and mount a folder in the (desktop)/(thunar side pane) with every computer that have shared folders within, so you can just plug your XFCE box in a LAN and access shared content from every windows and linux computers without have to mount it by hand, as you do in windows computers for example. Or at least some program like the smb4k for KDE that alows you to mount with a single click what you want. EDIT: found out some way to do it, but i still prefer that someone include it in thunar: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=304131&highlight=xubuntu

Why invent the wheel a second or third time? There are a lot of solutions for this and i don't think xfce should provide its own method. I.e. fusesmb, as mentioned in the link, does the job quite well

FUSE currently isn't very GUI-friendly. There's work on an interface library (I believe it's called libfusi or something similar) that will hopefully make a GUI interface to this sort of thing much easier to create. –kelnos

I also like the idea of the network neighborhood type of applet, but I'd also like it to be included in the regular file manager of choice. A couple things that could be done: Someone might want to gather together the links and/or procedures they know of which can provide this functionality and place them in a wiki page. Also, it would be good to decide if Xfce is going to be just the desktop “container” for other apps or not. Right now Xfce provides Thunar (and Ristretto, among others), but there are many people like myself who wouldn't use Thunar in place of other good file managers such as XFE. In fact, I like the idea of Xfce not providing apps. Thanks. - KitchM

Desktop-search integration with MetaTracker. Xfce applications should take advantage of it, especially Thunar for quick file tagging and advanced searching.

Reorganization of webpresentation to offer a consistent look and feel. I got lost an all these different wikis, project-pages and blogs several times.

I don't think you understand what you're talking about. Xfce already implicitly uses cairo when gtk 2.8 or higher is installed. Cairo can be used directly in a few other places – such as the panel – to create special effects, but should not be used all over the place. Note that cairo is NOT a silver-bullet for performance issues. Cairo's performance varies greatly depending on X.org version, video hardware, video drivers, etc. –kelnos

Add a roadmap to the main-page so that users know what might be released soon, or what you are working on.

Actually, I believe that they meant the main page of the whole web site. And not just for one version, but in general and overall to Xfce. - KitchM

Integrate PM of monitor, that make xscreensaver unneeden.

Integrate n xnumlock.

Good idea. Why should the user have to add it manually - KitchM

Alternative interface of wallpaper manager

Questionable in my opinion. We want one good place to change user settings, not ten of them.

Yes, one place for everything. So much more intuitive - KitchM

Please don't add XFCE unuseful software's like KDE and GNOME. I love XFCE. Also Please don't mix application role like KDE's Konqueror. I think the best thing is File Manager is only file manager don't have to be web browser.

very useless comments… bye and thnx – ElAngelo

I don't know if this is the exact place to ask for this, but what I would like to see is more “Preferred Applications”. Right now we have just WebBrowser, MailReader and Terminal Emulator. A configuration to also choose, eg: “MusicPlayer” or “FileArchiver” would be interesting and would also provide more uniformity to users who share their XFCE configuration among multiple computers or installations. — by Luis Machuca

I agree wholeheartedly. - KitchM

Provide 4.6 user guide and all application manuals.

I wish, a more consistent integration of encrypted hard installed volumes. For example, I can see my two encrypted drives in wallpaper picking dialog?! And I cannot see it in Thunar. That must mean that Thunar has a restrictive routine about adding hard installed volumes to the side pane, which is no good, I think. The sole useful place for mount-/unmounting encrypted volumes is the file manager. No matter if it is removable or not.

OpenCL-Support in various Applications

Provide a way to undo changes made in settings. I realize that a Cancel button is anathema to the instant-apply conventions used by the XFCE dialog boxes, but some dialogs provide the user with dozens of edit choices that are not easily remembered by humans. For example, say I want to experiment with the compositor settings to see what each of the sliders affect. I'd have to take a screen-shot of the dialog box prior to making any changes if I want to restore the sliders back to their original positions.

Panel

In the recent 4.8 release the bottom 'fat' panel came preconfigured to act as a dock replacement. The nice thing about docks is that most have an intellihide or window dodge feature, so the dock is visible unless a window is covering it. It would be nice if this could be implemented for the 4.10 release or as a patch.

There are a few design flaws with the XFCE panel, in my opinion, which had existed for long enough already to deserve mentioning:

The “Freely movable” mode of it is incompatible with the behavior of the “Task list” applet: if the panel is used as a floating one, the CDE-style, the task list makes it re-size bigger when the new windows appear. The immediate problem with it is caused by the lack of “Maximal width” in pixels parameter in the “Task List” dialog.

Next related inconvenience is that the panel is “Always on top” or at least there is no generic enough way to allow windows to cover it, which prohibits any creative multiple-panel setup - because the more panels, the more workspace is obscured at all times. The oddly working “Auto-hide” adds up ( xfce 4.6.1, Slackware 13 )

In 4.8 you can set the hidden disable-struts property, so windows can be overlapped.

The use of vertically oriented panels is very limited due to the fact that neither panel nor most of applets really assume the “vertical” sort of appearance. And, given that most of LCD monitors come in 16:9 form factor, “side-wise” alignments become handy.

+1 this. Fonts for panel items should stay horizontal; xfce4-weather-plugin, for example, remains vertical but Orage Panel Clock stays horizontal as it should. The only example I can think of is how Windows handles the Taskbar when in vertical mode and the improvements it's progressively made from XP-Vista-W7… it works progressively better in each version.

Wishful thinking: The xfce desktop supports only “Create a launcher” kind of element on the desktop. If the “panels” are allowed to be, 1stly, covered by windows, 2ndly, have transparent decorations and 3rd, more correct and explicit size limitations, that would probably make an easy way to mimic the “KDE Plasma” and Windoze 7 sort of behavior? Please consider those options. Thanks :)

Please add the possibility of capturing the top menu bar like OSX does: it's an efficient behavior and use it better the on-screen space, sometimes a limited resource.

There is not API for that, this is something that should first be exposed by Gtk+. – nick

The configuration of starter icons is somewhat misleading:

The dialog offers some standard terms to grab an icon from the theme. But they are few, and not even 'browser' or 'email' is under them.

The other method is to select an icon from the harddisk, which is made quite unintuitive (the filechooser should provide a list of directories read from XDG_DATA_DIRS). And, this path is fix then. A change of the icon theme can't change these icons too.

The better way would be to offer an ordered view of all possible default icon names (after freedesktop), by categories or common desktop terms (office,…)

Can attach other dialogs, will be nice to can attach conky script to panel.

The panel supports quick infos, it seems. However, they disappear after two seconds, and I don't know how to look through them afterward.

Google has into how you can change the Gtk tooltip behaviour through gtkrc.

Numbers for names in the panels' config dialog are confusing and can lead to deleting the wrong one. – fixed in 4.8

Add apt-watch applet support for Debian Etch. File a feature request at your favorite distro, this is NOT Xfce's task. Or maybe write your own plugin…

Add a delay for the autohide option. The GTK menu popup delay is 225ms. – fixed in 4.8 and it can be tuned with the popup-delay and popdown-delay style properties.

Support for fake transparency, so people with bad video cards can have a transparent panel without composite. People with bad video cards shouldn't use transparency nor shadows…

Create an add new items dialog like Firefox. Maybe with some ExoToolbars inspiration.

Completely hide the panel when autohide is enabled.

Not a good idea, because it is nice to see the line and know where they are. Unless the user is given a toggle option for that particular purpose. - KitchM

Use fixed sizes for the panel, like 16, 32, 48, 64. Those sizes should actually represent the size available by the launcher icon, to prevent fuzzy icons. – fixed in 4.8 with the force-gtk-icon-sizes style property.

This would force users using SVG icons to use a specific size.

It would IMHO be a bad idea to implement this, especially with hard coded values based on common icon sizes. Not least considering that plugins like the Launcher, Xfce Menu, and Mail Watcher places their icons within a GtkButton, which results in some border around the icons, essentially making the area available to icons smaller than the panel size. It would be better to fix issues with fuzzy icons in the plugins; I personally likes this solution, even though I think the result from the gtk_icon_theme_get_icon_sizes function should be used instead of hard coded icon size values (if this gets implemented, please consider to watch the icon theme for changes by connecting to the “changed” signal, and redo the icon size if needed).

Wrap the panel. – fixed in 4.8. Stacking is a bit too complicated, so for now there is a new-line option in the separator plugin.

Another good idea would be to allow “stacking” of panels by providing a “snap-to” toggle so that the botton edge of one would attach to the top edge of another and allow them to auto-hide together. Most of the time the panel is just too darn small to get everything on one. But then one has multiple panels at different edges of the screen and they create mouse navigation problems. - KitchM

Improve theming of the panel. This is partly done by setting widget names, so you can change their layout in the gtkrc file. – fixed in 4.8. All plugins and objects have their own class and plugin names are set by default (including unique id).

Add option to disable panel! Just don't start it then! (quit the panel and log out saving your session)

Drag and Drop items directly in the panel. For example: DnD a .desktop file between items to create a launcher.

Dragging an item to an 'auto-hidden' panel opens that panel. – fixed in 4.8, hold control to drop between launchers.

Resize a 'auto-hidden' panel according to content. – fixed in 4.8

Make the pager-plugin compatible to Beryl. I like the visual pager very much, because it makes working very easy. However I like beryl also very much, because it makes working funnier… – fixed in wnck, if you use only virtual workspaces and not a combination of virtual and normal workspaces.

Add a pager option to disable the display of icons. – fixed in 4.8, which also features a button mode.

Check mouse position and collapse a auto-hidden panel if the mouse is not on the panel. – that's the whole idea behind auto-hide, if it doesn't work it's a bug.

Full size panels should not overlap each other (on a screen corner). That's something about usability I suppose ;)

A global (per panel) switch to disallow plugins to expand the panel.

Add option to change panel background, and make possible to use difference backgrounds in some panels. – fixed in 4.8, which support of transparency too.

Would be nice if a transparent background image would set panel transparent, too.

Would be great if the background settings like in Terminal would be added. – not a good idea, nick

Add rounded corners and thin-and-configurable border to the panel.

Add native fish-eye effect when rolling over panel's icons and boxes.

Possibility of causing that plugins works interlocked in the panel, or the System tray. For example, to cause that xfce4-clipman-plugin appears in the system tray. (But even that in 4.5.x can be hidden.). Being able to also use it of like always in the panel.

.. and to be able to do it with libxfcepanel

Use seperate controls for panel transparency, and panel text/icons transparency. This would create a look as if the icons were embedded on the desktop.

add a slider to adjust panel's background only

add a tick to select panel's color

Toggle option (Bug 3856).

Two or more panels on the same side (two panels in bottom of screen for example; one for launch applications and other for listing all actual windows). Gnome can do that, why not xfce? – see the wrapping option above.

Please consider adding a simple modification of unhiding behavior for people annoyed by a panel popping up when the cursor accidentally crosses the sensitive area - see patch posted at https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=263607. This could probably be easily integrated with panel properties.

(Re)Add an option to allow other windows to cover the panel, like in KDE.

Like in Xfce3 and the early versions of xfce4. Why this was disabled is beyond me. No, using devilspie is not a user friendly option.

When auto-hide enabled, add option to show the panel (and it will be automatically autohiding afterward) when switching desktop (with command-line).

Thunar

Ability to view and edit the properties of multiple files and/or folders - the most of the other filemanagers can do this.

Let me delete files directly, every other filemanager can do this!

Shift-delete does this.

let me please add this to the dropdown menu

The ability to drag a selection box and select files in detailed view

This works in 1.0.1

Ability to change the icons and emblems in the bookmarks-sidebar

Add an Option to display the xdg-menues in sidebar(Ability to use thunar like osx-finder)

Show the properties of more than one selected file/folder at the same time, it will make easy to know the size of some folders without see the individual proprierts and calculate by hand the total size (Bug #1879).

Show the size of the folder and the size of its content when selecting a folder, instead of only the size of the folder itself… isn't very useful know the some bytes size of the folder.

Some way to use the side pane as “tree” and “shortcuts” at the same time, maybe dividing the side pane in the half if you select both ways at the same time. I realy enjoy using tree mode, but have some shortcuts for most-accessed folders is extremely useful and I think loads of people would enjoy it.

Make tree side pane behavior more similar to the main pane: Allow dragging and dropping of folders (to copy and move). Show the custom actions (open terminal, etc).

Add tree-view-like folder expansion to the main pane. (Make it configurable on/off for people who don't like the behavior.)

Add support for mount fixed disks (like gnome) in side pane not only removable disks.

Allow exo-mount to override fs types. Example: gnome volume manager does this by default on Debian for ntfs –> ntfs-3g if you have it installed.

Just a few small things to make life easier - mostly taken from rox-filer

Auto-fit window when entering a directory, and double click refresh and auto-fit.

Right-click on toolbar buttons to perform the action in a new window, e.g right-click refresh opens another window for the same directory. (I would expect ctrl+click to open in a new window. I think most people expect a menu to popup when they right-click on the toolbar. Maybe a menu could be added to the toolbar with the option to open the new window an item in the menu.)

Option to drag from Firefox to a window and download the file, more useful than a link?, using wget or similar.

Obviously not going to happen anytime soon but integration of compressed file navigation into the file manager (this could be more of a volman thing).

If this means what I think it means, you can use the following custom action (all on one line; make it apply to directories only; test it with something non-destructive like “mkdir test”): CUSTOM_COMMAND=$(zenity --entry --title "Custom Command" --text "Enter command you would like to execute:") ; xfce4-terminal --working-directory=%f -x $CUSTOM_COMMAND

leaftag support!

A detailed view without icons and smaller vertical distance.

Make plugins more accessible and easier to enable or disable. When I right click an .iso file, I get four different cd-burning related menu options, the standard “open with” set and two apparently thunar-specific options “burn image” and “open project”. The last two appear to belong to a plugin, but I can't find it. If they're not part of some plugin, there should be an option to disable them because I don't need the redundancy.

Organization features: as many of the target audience are on older machines that can not handle Compiz/Beryl, it would be neat to have some other window-organization features available. Namely tabbed navigation, and/or possibly a column view similar to that of a Mac Finder.

Not to show the archives that appear in “.hidden”. Something that works until in gtkfilechoser.

… and whilst we're mentioning Dolphin, how about an Open/Edit As Root option. I find it tedious to go to a command line when I need to edit something (xorg.conf for instance) or when drag 'n drop is all you should need to copy something. I understand the security benefits of restricted privileges, but open terminal → sudo this that and the other; pain in the proverbial. Obviously Open/Edit as root will open a password prompt allowing only the admin to do, well, admin stuff.

What you want is to install a desktop entry file with the command prefixed by gksudo or the like. Copy the original desktop entry file from /usr/share/applications to ~/.local/share/applications and edit it. Don't forget to change the name to “<Application> as root”. Repeat this task for each application that you are used to run as root.

Link in Configure custom actions to a wiki page with lots of custom actions (per above!)

Finder-like column view in Thunar: Column_View thunar - it is simple and faster than Nautilus, but after i have experience on finder, I think it is useful for most of us switching in different folder.“especially when you want to move a file several levels up.

Incorporate (whether graphically or in a .conf file somewhere) the ability to tell Thunar not to generate thumbnails for files bigger than a specified size http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4460. Other possible work-arounds (I'm not a programmer): child-process-control where Thunar makes sure convert does not cause a thrash condition, or giving the child process a specified amount of time before it is killed, etc.

Old versions of Thunar (Eg EL5) are around 5x faster than the current version (Eg EL6) - following the Nautilus trend…

sometimes copy and paste keyboard shortcut combinations do not work because it is too slow to execute the first operation

When copying and pasting a file 'chicken.txt', it becomes 'copy of chicken.txt' instead of 'chicken (copy).txt'. This is incompatible with the File Manager's folder auto refresh/update functionality (ie continuously reorder files in list, including new files created and existing files renamed). In a folder with a large number of files, and where file lists are ordered by 'name', if a new file is created and/or renamed it likely disappears from view, therefore becoming difficult/inconvenient to further manipulate (eg rename/open)

Also, copy and paste from the location/address bar needs to operate consistently (NB if a file has been selected, Thunar copies the selected file's full path instead of the location bar address)

Add a right-click option to the trash for “Shred Files,” similar to Mac OSX's “Secure Delete” function. It could be a front-end to GNU Shred, which is in coreutils, and should be on most people's systems, and hopefully would be easy to implement. There should also be a corresponding option in preferences to choose the number of passes.

Moving deleted files from a pendrive to the general trash, and no creating .Trash folder in the pendrive. It's very anoying because you have to be root to delete it, and normally you want to have pendrive clean a free spaced.

A global option to disable .Trash folders on removable devices. Alternatively, look for a file named something like .notrash at the root of a removable device. If present, don't use .Trash folder on device. (USB thumb drives do not typically have gigabytes of otherwise unused space)

A right-click option to empty the trash on a specific volume.

Window manager

Make application shortcuts globally configurable, so, for example, F1 can be globally unassigned from providing “help” without having to configure each application individually. (F1 is close to ~, !, @, and Esc on laptop keyboards, all of which are more frequently used than “Help”. Accidentally pressing F1 is a major annoyance when trying to type and email or cd to the home directory.)

Make window manager and keyboard shortcuts take precedence over application defined shortcuts.

Option to choose whether a key shortcut is “maskable” or not. For example, F11 is commonly used to toggle fullscreen, but some applications might have other meaning for that key; thus F11 might be marked as maskable - application can capture it before window manager (xfce) does. But, for example, Super+F11 might be marked as unmaskable and no application can catch it - it just makes what it is configured to do in xfce. (Does it solve “taking precedence” mentioned above?)

If a shortcut already exists when a user tries to assign it (eg, F1), notify and request disabling it before reassignment.

xfce-setting-show → Window Manager → Keyboard

Key binding for killing the application (Alt + F4).

Key binding to popup the window menu (Alt + Spacebar).

Cycle through workspaces, like Alt + Tab for applications.

While using the Alt + Tab window switching shortcut allow selecting a window by left click with the mouse.

Key binding for fvwm/metacity style 'raiselower' function. (I've been trying to live with separate raise and lower keys and it really slows me down compared to the 'raise if below, else lower' single key that lets you cycle through your stacked windows.)

Key binding for moving a window to different heads (=monitors) on one workspace pretty much as it can be moved over different workspaces (left, right, up, down …). Maybe one could introduce an option at the same time such that the user can decide what happens when he triggers the move of a window on the leftmost monitor to the left: it could be moved to the rightmost monitor either on the current workspace or on the workspace left to the current workspace.

volume control and other weird buttons on newer keyboards. Does a command exists that controls these functions (and provides a nice osd indicator), that can just be assigned a keyboard shortcut?

This kind of controls sends an ascii code that is not recognized/accepted by the current shortcuts setup window.

Allowing more than one hotkey (key shortcut) for operations.

Add an option to treat similar modifier keys (left/right ctrl, shift, windows, etc.) the same way. E.g. when I bind my windows key to the root menu, only the left window key works. The right one does nothing. And vice versa.

Have a visual indicator for workspace switching.

I like to have certain programs on certain desktops so when I just boot up is is sometimes annoying to try and find what desktop I am on and if I switched. OpenBox has a great (albeit ugly) dialog.

With more than even just two desktops its easy to loose your orientation, especially when some desktops are blank as mentioned above. This feedback would both please the poweruser and give the casual user useful feedback

Mouse

Don't give focus on mouse wheel.

Edge resistance of mouse cursor when it hits the edge of the screen on multimonitor systems. This will, among other things, make dragging scrollbars of maximized windows easier.

Show the location of the cursor on the screen by doing Alt + Rightclick (some some customizable keyboard/mouse shortcut).

Shortcut to hide the cursor from the screen or move it to the bottom-left corner. Could be useful when you're typing and the cursor is in front of your text. (This could be provided as a program or script that moves the mouse cursor to some specified location, then assigned a keyboard shortcut.)

Raise window under mouse cursor on keypress.

Show/hide windows by clicking on active workspace.

Window Management

Intelligent placement is annoying. The configuration of more or less intelligence is also not intuitive in this respect. please, allow for turning that feature off and having windows always pop up at center or do it more intelligent, like not opening the window at all but only registering it as a taskbar-entry or a temporary desktop (tray) icon.

Placeable “guides” a'la inkscape/gimp, which act as window separators, for example if you place a guide in the middle of your screen, a window that is maximised is maximused to take up the area of the sash where the window's centre is.

XFWM should respect sloppy mode while DnD and give focus to the target window.

xfce's strength is it's simplicity. sometimes, however, it doesn't behave … whenever there are popup-panels (e.g. during an update process), those panels come up again and again. I'd like to focus (my brains) only on the window I'm currently focused (window-wise) on. (Please correct me, if you can toggle this in some setting already…)

Maybe not a fix but a workaround: disable the setting that creates new dialogs in the current workspace, and move the offending application to another one. it will not bug you anymore.

Maybe it would be nice if the Windowmanager could snap to the corners of other windows, that, when I`m moving a window witch is already snapped to another would snap to the x or y position of the other one.

If a application doesn't close within <x> seconds after trying to close it, prompt the user if he wants to kill the app.

I think magical behaviour goes against usability and simplycity. it will also harm applications with long shutdown time, such as bittorrent clients. Maybe a better fix is a shortcut (ctl+alt+win+backspace) that calls `xkill` and you can click the window to kill it. no magic. user in full control. no annoying popups for long shutdown applications.

Option to exclude empty workspaces (empty as in: no non-pager, non-taskbar … application on the workspace) from the cycle list.

Show the size of a window when resizing. + also show screen location information (in pixels). Make both optional.

Hide also the window border when a window is shaded.

Add the ability to do automatic resize to feet/inches/cm on the screen (as done in Icewm). Press Alt-XX and all windows are resized to equal size vertically or horizontally.

Add a new placement style (as in Golem). If you move the mouse during placement, the window sticks to the mouse. When the mouse stops moving for <x> seconds the window is placed under the mouse.

Actually focus windows when switching between them with Alt+Tab.

Make this configurable/user selectable

Raise the window instead of showing the border.

Show all windows in a grid while using Alt+Tab, like Exposé does.

Please yes! ideally with non-composite support showing only the window decoration and a huge application icon inside. that would be good enough for usability!

Allow selecting application with mouse, when Alt+Tab is pressed and list of running applicatin is shown.

Group windows, so you can close and resize an entire group or (similar) windows.

An option to hide window decorations behind other windows but not hide the windows themselves. Sounds a bit odd, but it would mean even less clutter where screen real-estate is an issue. Bringing the window decorations back could be done with alt+click.

Possibility to maximize a window in the “free” desktop space (so without covering other windows). This will be useful for applications like the Gimp.

Visual display of margins when editing them.

Allow alteration of transparency per window.

Add a slider to the “Window Manager Tweaks” dialog to control “Opacity of active window”

Add button 'always on top' to current buttons (minimize, maximize, stick, shade, close) in title panel.

Add Amiga OS style z-order toggle button. (Logic: If the window is anywhere other than at the front of the z-order, bring it to the front, otherwise, send it to the back.)

Add buttons for 'maximize vertically' and 'maximize horizontally'

Add a possible 'maximize vertically' action to be executed when the window bar is clicked on.

Add “spacer” for the titlebar, so it is possible to, e.g., separate the close button from the rest without moving them to the opposite sides of the title (for example, like in KDE4)

when “minimising all” windows, I actually mean all windows within the current desktop …

Limited tiling window management. It can cost a lot of work, but I consider it as very useful thing. (check whether x-tile does what you want: http://www.giuspen.com/x-tile)

Intelligent placement could behave differently:

Windows could be created not only on center, but e.g. on bottom (user defines).

in moment a solution can be a running daemon names devilspie or something else.

If there is insufficient place to create new non-overlapping window, some small windows could be moved.

Keyboard shortcuts to place window in chosen corner, but with respect for other windows - after placement none windows overlap. (Use x-tile: http://www.giuspen.com/x-tile)

User create WindowGroup - e.g. all GIMP windows would be one group. Group have main-window and only this window have visible decoration (windows within a group don't have it). All windows (subwindows?) within a group would be dockable. In group window subwindows would behave like in tiling window manager, but it would be great if some subwindows could overlap.

It would be awesome if group layout could be saved in file and maybe automatically restored.

The “fill” feature, I guess, is all what you need. You can have a vertical maximized application on the right side of your screen, move a terminal on the left and maximize it only in the available space – it will be maximized against the borders of the neighbor windows, and the more you maximize (fill) the more it expands against other windows. The default keyboard shortcuts for maximize are Alt+F5/6/7 IIRC, I have set my keyboard shortcuts for filling to Shift+Alt+F5/6/7. – mike

Ability to keep windows in a specific workspace. For example, if I have my browser open in workspace #1 and I click a link inside my IM client (in workspace #2), i want the link to open in the running browser but I don't want the browser to move to the current workspace. This could either be a global setting or an option for each window (like Stick).

New workspaces get added when the user tries to place a window on a workspace which doesn't yet exist (using keyboard shortcuts for example).

Workspaces (except for workspace 1) 'collapse' when the user closes the last remaining app on a workspace.

New workspace can be created when user tries to change focus to a workspace that doesn't exist (useful for trying to access the desktop), if the current workspace is not already empty.

<Winkey>+'D' - Minimize/maximize all windows

One thing I liked about compiz was the scale plugin; I think it's expose on Mac OS-X. For me it was just a flick of the mouse to the upper right corner and there was all my open windows from all workplaces. Don't need all that other stuff that compiz has, but something like scale is very handy, or even Shift Switcher.

How about skipping over empty workspaces when switching using the Ctrl-Alt-Arrow keys?

Themes

Allow for translucency in themes. This could allow both transparent window decorations as well as an easy way to make theme-specific effects such as drop shadows.

More flexible way to use current Gtk color scheme in decorations. For example, by using grayscale png images, tinted by specified color (by mapping white to this color, leaving black as is, or vice versa, as specified in themerc). Multiple png layers would bring full benefit.

Allow themes to have alternate decorations when maximized vs. not maximized. Ex. rounded window corners when not maximized, square when maximized. - this is implemented

Customizable position of the window buttons. Like with tabs (top, bottom, left, right).

Make a tool to import metacity themes.

Improved theme installation. Could be done by automatically install a theme when the tarball is dragged in the properties dialog or a special button.

Eye-candy and compositing effects

Disabling transparency for single windows would be great. It is very annoying if you are watching a video with mplayer for example while doing every day work so the mplayer window (video) looks pallid because of the transparency. To enable/disable this feature for every window there could maybe an option in the xfwm window menu (where you also can stick/hide/etc. the window).

OpenGL based window/compositing manager. Not for wobbly windows, but for speeding up the window manager.

Comment: This isn't something that should be hacked around in Xfwm4. Render needs to be speeded up in Xorg, benefiting all applications.

Forget wobbly windows and other useless eye-candy (if you want that rubbish, use Beryl). But there are several useful things that could be done, like blur-behind transparency

Make sure effects can be individually disabled (for people who are easily distracted or with slower computers)

Provide a visual representation of window being shaded/rolled-up. The current action of instantly shading is unintuitive to someone who doesn't know what that feature is.

Transparency should only apply to inactive (no focus) applications … now, when a new window pops up in the browser the main-browser-window gets transparent and thats a bit confusing . So don't make parent-widgets transparent when child-widget appears.

Provide miniature of windows when pressing <Alt-Tab> if compositing is active, like metacity now does. I know that something similar could be done using skippy-xd (if you manage to have it working) or kompose, but the result is not nice (fonts are different, etc,etc)

Posibility to use diferent shadows settings (radius,deltas,opacity,…) for maximized,minimized,tooltips,panel,…

A zoom feature would be nice.

Other

Could a plugin or module system be added to xfwm? Scriptable plugins (python, scheme, or some such) could provide a nice easy way for people to pare down this wish list.

Imho a plugin interface would add unreasonable complexity to xfwm.

Actually it should be a main feature of a GUI Window Manager!

WM-Pluginwishes

A plugin resembling the put-plugin from compiz - Maybe this one can be an integrated feature. Especially if you don't like mice that much, you'll enjoy that. However I don't know the performance gap between xfwm4(-compositing) and compiz with just a few plugins, so somebody might tell me (in discussion or mail) if it makes sense to wish for such a plugin.

GPU acceleration for transparent panel and other graphics goals.

Would it be possible to integrate the xfce4-appfinder into the xfce-menu?

not everyone would like only appfinder as mainmenu i think, but i like appfinder too. a solution can be to make a starter for app-finder and remove the standard xfce-menu from the panel. if you like it in a corner or anywhere else you can use a daemon like devilspie. with that xfce4-appfinder can started everytime on the same place and it looks like menu

From a post in Jannis Pohlmann's blog, xfce4-appfinder could be used as an xfrun4 alternative for launching applications. It'd be great if it could be closed by just tapping the Esc key.

The latest version from git closes just fine with Esc (it inherits a GtkDialog) but the stable xfce-4.6 version inherits from GtkWindow which doesn't allow this

I'd like to see the ability to fullscreen a window. that is, typing a config file or something on my tiny laptop screen, a quick Ctrl+enter or something could zoom into that window. (making it bigger so it fills the screen).

Look into xfwm4-settings for the shortcuts, the default should be Alt+F11.

Ah, yes, I didn't know about that previously. But it's not really what I'm looking for… seems that expands the window to fill the screen, without the borders & decorations. What I miss from E16 is that Ctrl+Enter enlarges the window (so the dimensions are still the same – my terminal emulator is still 80×25, but appears larger.) That's handy for a small screen like mine.

Desktop Manager

NOTE: For serious feature requests, please file bugs at http://bugzilla.xfce.org/ and mark the severity as 'enhancement'. I don't read this page often and I don't have the time/energy to keep track of things outside of Bugzilla. –kelnos

please add a option to use bold text

Allow file icons on the desktop *and* application launchers in the top level of the desktop right-click menu, at the same time. Xfce 4.4 allowed this. 4.6 apparently does not.

Icons should allow for single click. The title could pop up at a longer mouseover. (bug #1797)

Dragging a link from the browser onto the desktop should allow for the download of the source file.

Xfdesktop is not a network browser. –kelnos

Let different workspaces have different backgrounds. Could be done by setting the background in the workspace settings. (bug #369)

This is doable, but would make switching workspaces very slow on most systems. Of course, people don't have to use the feature if it's too slow. –kelnos

It wouldn't be slow if cached into memory… and it would improve greatly the usabilty of multiple workspaces. OMHO this missing feature has always been a serious drawback of xfdesktop. –Tofe

Customize mouse button actions, so you can change which menu pops up on a specific mouse button.

Add option to disable the icons in the desktop menus, instead of using the gtk-menu-images = false setting.

Option is back in 4.6.

Root window terminal, so the entire background is covered with a terminal emulator.

When a folder on the desktop is right-clicked, a “Desktop” submenu is available (create launcher, etc). Allow customization and ability to add this submenu to the normal desktop menu (xfdesktop –menu).

Customization isn't on my TODO list, but I'm definitely planning on doing something similar with the main desktop menu. –kelnos

Allow animated backgrounds with .mng/.gif images

God, no. –kelnos

When looking at ristretto, I can say you DON'T EVER want a full-screen 1600×1200 animated background-image. It will most likely be the only thing your computer will be good for then. Showing wallpapers…. Therefore I can only agree with kelnos on this. -stephan

let the users decide

Yes, it is always preferrable to allow the user to set any setting they could ever desire. Unfortunately, adding that functionality is probably quite low on the developer's list. (But I still always push for it.) - KitchM

Screens of mini pc's with 7 - 10 ” aren't 1600×1200 and one little Gif/Mng, in the middle of the screen …. not sure it would low the system that much . But that's ok, i stop to search a way.

I put in question if XFCE could drop desktop icons–and possibly even panel support–in favour of a generalized 'cupboard' app coming around like a window of free space to assort 'things'. Users would have more control over (window and content) size, placement and order.

Launcher icons && minimized window icons (simultaneously)

I don't really like this idea. Then you need to somehow indicate that they're different. How? A special icon? Sounds weird. A special color? What color? How does that interact with the gtk theme? –kelnos

An option to have Thunar pop up a new window on desktop double-click. Proved to be extremely useful.

Interesting… I like this. –kelnos

On second thought, kinda unintuitive. There's nothing that would make you think a double-click on the desktop should open the desktop in a new window. Might add a “open in new window” item to the desktop context menu, though. –kelnos

A modifier key to keep the desktop menu open after selecting an item.

Not possible - gtk controls menu behavior, and changing this behavior is not only difficult, but bad for usability. –kelnos

Add a titlebar to desktop menu.

What's a titlebar? –kelnos

If there are no desktop icons, make dragging image files to the desktop change the wallpaper.

Sounds good. –kelnos

Auto-refresh for xfdesktop (As opposed to hitting F5 every time somthing happens to /home/user/Desktop)

You need to have gamin or FAM installed, and thunar-vfs needs to be compiled to support it. If you're using FAM, the 'famd' daemon needs to be running. –kelnos

Marquee selecting for icons; moving one icon at a time gets old fast

Implemented for 4.6.

Add option to arrange or keep icons arranged on the desktop.

Optional inclusion of Novell SLED 10 desktop menu (or new XFCE version using similar design goals) as replacement for standard desktop menu.

We don't do distro-specific stuff. Distros are free to customise the menus they ship as they see fit, though. –kelnos

Add a option which makes it possible to extract the menu-toolbar from any window and place it into a given panel where only the menu-toolbar of the currently active window is displayed. This would be similar to the mac os. In my opinion it increases the usability of an os extremely. Especially for notebook users and computer with small screens this option comes in handy. When many windows are displayed on the screen, lots of place is being occupied by the the menu-toolbar which on the other hand reduces the area for a window to actually display its content. It will also be easier for the user to access the menu, since the cursor only needs to be moved to the panel (which is on the edge of the screen). For some people it is hard to move the cursor using a touchpad or track pointer to any point on the screen. It is easier to just throw the cursor onto an edge or into a corner.

This has nothing to do with xfdesktop. This turns out to be very difficult to do, and requires support from the toolkit (gtk). There are a few patches floating around (try Google), but they're rather hackish and unreliable (i.e., some apps crash when you use them). –kelnos

Arranging icons in desktop just like KDE-refresh desktop/Gnome-cleanup by name.

I'm sure this has been asked before (and countless times), but… what about allowing an external program to draw the background? Right now the only way to have eg.: xsnow or xplanet, is to disable xfdesktop completely, which means the drawing program is not aware of the screen space occupied by panels, and the compositor is not aware there is actually a background behind, thus showing a plain dull grey “failsafe background”. — Luis Machuca B.

These apps can draw properly on the xfdesktop window if they can accept a parameter to take the window ID of xfdesktop's window.

Xfdesktop in 4.6 also supports a “transparent” mode that makes the entire desktop window transparent, except for the icons. This requires a compositing manager running, though, which means you won't be able to see xsnow (etc.) anyway, because xfwm4 (at least) doesn't draw the root window at all.

Automatically change wallpapers once in a while.

You can do this by creating a brackdrop list and adding xfdesktop to a cron job (using crontab -e).

There should be an option so that when minimizing applications to the desktop they can be removed from the task list. Eg in this mode the task list would contain unminimized applications and all your minimized applications would be on the desktop.

Display Manager

Xfce needs one as an official component, its a shame that some Xfce-Distributions comes with gdm as display manager

maybe someone can fork lxdm or slim…

the most promising DM at the moment is LightDM. Perhaps Xfce would consider accepting the project under its umbrella

Run dialog

Completion of commands, not only already typed commands.

Use the same history+back-end as the “Verve Command Line” goodie.

Support for commands in non-latin charsets (everything except verve seems to have it)

A GUI to run as a different user if in the 'wheel' group.

You can use gksu -u <username> <command>

When opening a new run command dialog, it opens empty instead of with the last typed command.

Is this a wish for an option or does this sometimes happen to you and you think it's a bug? The last command should be selected when xfrun4 comes up so just start typing if it isn't what you want.

Can show big (64×64 or better 128×128) icon of typped command, and may be a comment if it`s a .desktop

show button icon only when gtk-button-images is set to true

Why needs this dialog a minimize & maximize button?

Mousepad

Support for syntax highlighting. Possible backends are Scintilla or gtksourceview. (don't rely on backends, make a small library just for mousepad, perhaps plugins for mousepad? create another emacs with a billion plugins?… nah. mousepad works just fine. open up GVIM or XEMACS if you want syntax highlighting. *don't reinvent the wheel*)

I disagere. Mousepad is nice, but virtually useless to me since it doesn't have syntax highlighting. I want to do development, but I can't stand emacs, and vim is too cryptic. - Use Geany or Scite then

Although I agree to not reinvent the wheel, I think mousepad could use a little bit more programmer friendly features. (syntax highlighting is going a little far)

I disagree with sytax highlightning. For that we have NEdit (if we want to go with light software). I think better improvements would be the ability to call an external progra to process the file (eg.: what about a 'sed-in-place' option?). — Luis Machuca B.

Tabs

GTKspell

Keep mousepad as fast as it is now (I'm using 0.2.12), no need to bloat it with features. Sometimes I wonder if it actually is a gtk+ 2 application, because it feels even faster than xterm. It starts instantaneously on my duron 800, I wish every application would start as fast (even the “about xfce” dialog box takes longer to start). Great job!

UTF-16 support

Encrypt-Decrypt for text formatted as base64 hex and so on

Terminal

Make it possible to use a different font in individual tabs and / or windows, without changing the general font setting.

Ideally, implement customizable profiles, which have some settings different from the default. A user would (optionally) choose a profile when opening a new tab or a terminal window. This could be done for example by holding down the left button for a second, or right clicking, on the new tab button, or via the menus. See other terminal emulators to see how this has been done. This would be a more general solution and would allow users to use all kind of settings in their profiles, not just setting the font.

Make the amount that is scrolled in history via mouse wheel configurable

When i switch to a non-latin keyboard layout, the various CTRL shortcuts (CTRL-A, CTRL-E etc.) no longer work (bug #3037).

Option to be docked as some end of screen.

Option to blink the terminal window when an exectued command is finished (bug #5514).

What about searching the scroll-back buffer? It proves to be very useful to me (bug #3649).

Hide mouse pointer while typing.

It is a hidden option, c.f. MiscMouseAutohide in ~/.config/Terminal/terminalrc

Ability to split terminal window, much like konsole in kde 4

make it themeable(set a default bgcolor/textcolor over gtkrc

Select all option would be useful.

Option to redirect all output to a log file, ideally, the log file could be set by tag.

GTK engine

Documentation of how it does what it does (what is the effect) and how to use it for theming.

Try Mirage. It's as good as any Xfce viewer could ever be. It allows basic edits and save functionality.

xfbrowse – A WebKitGTK+ (formerly gtk-webcore), dillo or gecko based internet browser.
* This is way too much work for our relative small development team.
* And a waste of effort. Seing that there's a current for cross desktop development, what would be the advantage? Better HIG compliance? Better XDG compliance? These are already being worked on…

xfmail – A small and easy to use mail reader. – Postler has already been released

It's possible to use the Tinymail framework for this.
* There are already Sylpheed and Claws Mail.
* Sylpheed has no support for proxies, also not with tsocks. – Both Sylpheed and Claws are open source - expand it if it doesnt meet your requirements!

xffind/xfsearch – File search utility. It could simply be a front-end for the unix find utility which is available in virtually every *nix system. Searching for a specific pattern inside a file could also be done, through grep, using find's -exec parameter. To make it even more useful, it could be integrated to Thunar's context menus.

Try catfish (by the developer of Postler and Midori)

Bindings

Ruby Bindings for the Xfce desktop environment.

PHP Bindings for the Xfce desktop environment.

Session Manager

Be able to switch user, ie. the programs one is running will still run in the background.

How about a way to open a new login window inside a desktop? Gnome development reference here

Xfce is a popular desktop choice on the PS3, it would be cool if the session manager had an option to run in “PS3 mode” where one of the exit choices would be “boot to game OS”, running the ps3-boot-game-os command, saving a(nother) run through the boot loader after reboot, and putting the ps3-boot-game-os operation into a more logical place, instead of just being another app.

Show a message what-to-do when xfwm4 or xfdesktop is not running or crashed. Because when it happen the first time, you have no idea what happening to xfce and what to do as reboot won't fix it. –mhtrinh

Orage

Have an option to send a wall message on alarms. (Yes, there are (still) ppl who like to work in the real terminal mode. And no, sound is not an option.)

This is already possible in Orage 4.5. It has alarm-type “Procedure” where you can run any os command.

make it skinnable(non-static icon)

Sync calendar over CalDAV. This would make Orage really useful in combination with various online calendars and would allow to sync the calendar across various applications and devices.

Music and Video

Create a multimedia library, with support for audio and video (encoding and decoding). I know there are other libs around like ffmpeg, but it sucks, the api is not documented, it will never be stable, etc… Just a simple lib with support for the most common audio formats (wav,mp3,ogg,flac) and video formats (avi,mpg,ogm).
not something xfce as a project will ever do…

Add more functionality to xfmedia, like subtitles, and managment of playlists, may be and interface like as kaffeine

and please let me choose the audio track

make it skinable like gmplayer or the xine ui

XFCE-splash

ok this is minor, but it would be great to add more theming support, maybe a fully configurable engine based on gtk, with different options(use icons like the kdesplash, or use a progressbar, animation support(continuous displayed image like the thobbber or a mng(to display images like the default mouse splash or the moodin-engine under kde)

there is a project for bookmark managing called Chipmark which maybe can be a good back-end for this suggested project - maybe there is already a support for Firefox's JSON importing option (which was not published, yet)

MOC - music on console, does the job (not the same feeling, though) & it could be a good start-up for GUI development aimed for youth that are pretty nervous when it comes to Cli (command-line) interface or Console via a terminal emulator.

ZIK is not Ruby, and AFAIK, Xfce Goodies should be C/C++. I have started a similar project, it's still ugly, but if someone is interested in helping, we could make it GTK “native” and Xfce-like.

Productivity tools for XFCE

Lightweight word processor. AbiWord is really buggy and not lightweight. I think of something much more lightweight and efficient. It would be nice it supported only one format (it could be ODT) for read & write and (x)HTML & PDF/PS output. This way, the developers could focus on something other than implementing closed and broken formats. ODT is gaining enough popularity these days anyways. Or one could add RTF as well. Second, the functionality should not compete with MS Word. This should be a basic word processor that allows you to just get the job done. XMPP connectivity and other things one can see in AbiWord these days are really abundant. — ilembitov

How about using an online web Office application for example like Google Docs (it's the only good one I know off-head). In the word processor you will obviously have to support OO-XML and OASIS OpenDocument which is a real hard MF task otherwise there is no point as you will be in a small nutshell being the only one able to read and save the documents. Perhaps a MS Wordpad-like application with RTF documents? For what's in my case, I'm a happy OOo user. But at last there are also Desktop-wiki applications like Zim and Tomboy that support wiki/camel syntax, and even standalone HTML files with javascript like Wiki on a stick and Tiddly wiki. — mike

Well, an online app can't really substitute a local one in this case (especially on a mobile device). Wordpad-like app is nice, but I don't really see any point in choosing RTF as default - the specification is pretty obscure and not really implemented correctly in contemporary MS products (although the spec is open, you still get compatibility issues). Second, I can't see a reason why choosing ODT would make it necessary to support OOXML as well. OOXML specs are enormous and intricated to my knowledge (although I am not really competent here). But you are right about WordPad (or Ted, in terms of functionality) - that's exactly what I want, just a little bit more contemporary and supporting a more recent standard as default. — ilembitov

I would be very much against an Xfword: Xfce is not in any way in the business of word processing. If you're looking for something lightweight and cool try LyX, a GUI to LaTeX that allows you to easily create beautifully typeset documents and presentations. The quality of the professionally-looking LaTeX- / LyX-generated PDF documents surpasses by far the capabilities of ordinary word processors (MS Word, OOo, Abiword, etc.).

Keyboard manager

give us a checkbox to enable the old Xsession kill(setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp), gnome has an option for that 1

It will be excellent to have a complete keyboard options, like an option to choose third level key, or to swap caps and ctrl, it will be very useful for non qwerty users and emacs users. Thanks!!

Power manager

Until now, the Xfce4-power-manager does not recognize if one types on tty 1-6. That means that one works on tty 1-6 and the Xfce-power-manager hibernates the Computer. It would be great, if xfce-power-manager would provide a daemon which runs in the background when the system boots and not only when i logged in into my XFCE session and which cares about tty 1-6, because some users work on the entire machine and not only on X. I think an background daemon is a good Idea to overcome this situation. Thanks